


But Have to Have

by chainofclovers



Category: Grace and Frankie (TV)
Genre: F/F, Post-Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-10
Updated: 2018-07-10
Packaged: 2019-06-08 02:41:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15233565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chainofclovers/pseuds/chainofclovers
Summary: Seven months ago, they owned oceanfront property in La Jolla. Now they’re spending a week in a rental in Carlsbad, a block removed from the water.





	But Have to Have

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kathryne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kathryne/gifts).



> This story is for the wonderful kathryne, who sent several great tumblr prompts, including "road trip." While this is a vacation story more than a road trip story, I'm hoping it counts! <3

_The deepest world we share_  
_And do not talk about_  
_But have to have, was there,_  
_And by that light found out._

— from "A Light Left On" by May Sarton

By the time the family caravan arrives at the beach house, Grace is in a rage just barely kept under her skin. The mid-morning drive north was brief but tiresome, Frankie's intentional good mood clashing with her intentional bad one. Frankie chewed dried mango and sang along to the radio around bites; Grace drove and seethed. Seven months ago, they owned oceanfront property in La Jolla. Now they’re spending a week in a rental in Carlsbad, a block removed from the water. As everyone drags their luggage inside, Grace directs her complaints at Frankie, but she doesn’t care who hears. “We just drove 40 minutes to spend 35 hundred dollars doing the exact same thing we could’ve done for free at our house. If we had a house.” 

“Hey, we have a house,” Frankie says with a breezy calm. A roof over their heads, she means. A place to live. She’s right, of course. They have a perfectly nice townhome in central San Diego. After Walden Villas, it’s paradise. “And besides, we never invited the family to stay over when we lived at the beach. Even B.D., we were hardly ever there at the same time.” 

Right again. In the old days, Before Divorce, the Hansons and the Bergsteins had a schedule to determine who could use the house when. Robert and Sol didn’t exactly keep to the official calendar, but Frankie’s point stands. The families owned a vacation home and didn’t use it that way. Everyone who spent nights in that house used it to seek a solace more personal than anything you’d find on a family trip. With only a few exceptions, that house had always been a place for a person to get away from another person, to try out a different configuration, to work through secrets. 

“Frankie’s right, Mom,” says Brianna as they walk inside. Brianna, repentant but bossy, proposed this trip. When she called to suggest going on vacation with the family—the entire family—Grace spent the first few minutes of the conversation thinking it was a joke. But Brianna was serious, and she took care of everything: she found the Carlsbad rental on VRBO, handled the booking, collected the funds. She arrived an hour before everyone else to assign bedrooms, and now she stands directing traffic next to the big kitchen island that’s the centerpiece of the house. “And _you_ aren’t spending 35 hundred. _You’re_ spending five hundred, just like everybody else.” 

It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, Grace knows it doesn’t matter, but her brain argues back: she’s not like everybody else, because Brianna’s given out couples’ discounts. She happens to know that Robert and Sol are paying five hundred total, as are Bud and Allison, Coyote and Nadia, Brianna and Barry, whereas Grace, Frankie, and Mallory are responsible as individuals for the same amount each. If Mallory didn’t come with four kids, and if Grace could even partially convince herself it was about the money, she’d point out the injustice, but it isn’t worth it. 

She tells herself that all she wants are vacation things, no matter how unnecessary the trip. All she wants is her old life reconfigured in this temporary place. She wants a drink, a book, and a moment of quiet on the balcony, which advertises a distant view of the water. She wants to listen to the ocean for the first time in a while; although she dreads the sound, dreads homesickness, she’s eager to get over it.

“So where’d you put us?” Frankie asks brightly, in a mango-colored voice designed to diffuse tension. So much for that. The words make Grace tense up, though Brianna only grins. 

“Frankie, you’re upstairs, last door on the right,” Brianna says. “StairMaster Mommy, you’re on this floor, second door on the left. I’d have given you the master suite, but Mallory needed space for two pack-and-plays, so.” 

Grace rolls her eyes, then glances at Frankie just in time to see panic drain from her expression. “Guess I’ll get settled.”

“Don’t go too crazy thanking me,” says Brianna.

“Thanks,” says Grace.

Frankie rushes upstairs without another word.

“Your new place is pretty small,” Brianna says quietly, as soon as Frankie’s gone. The words are just this side of judgmental, like somehow the townhome isn’t Brianna’s fault. “I figured you guys could use a little space. Her bedroom could not be further from yours.”

Nausea washes over Grace like a wave. It’s what telling a lie feels like, though she doesn’t say anything.

Even for a family that’s hardly vacationed together, vacation is a pretty easy formula. The kids took care of the grocery run before leaving town, have handled all the little details. The night before, Grace watched Mallory’s kids so Mallory could go alone to Costco for a beach canopy and a three-ton box of trail mix. With Coyote in L.A., Grace has spent more time babysitting lately. As challenging as it is, it’s so much easier than mothering, and this trip is nothing like the beach vacations she and Robert spent with the girls when they were small. Like magic, or like Bud and Mallory and Nadia know how to make themselves useful, coffee brews all morning, and at noon the kitchen island is strewn with cold cuts and chips and fruit salad, and everyone grazes. There are bottles of sunscreen on every surface, towels draped all over the house. 

So what if Robert and Sol spend half the day running off to argue about something or someone no one else cares to know anything about, and Mallory and Allison get into an fight about how much sunscreen a responsible mother would put on her kids. (Faith is coated in a layer half an inch thick, and so are the twins, but Allison’s convinced Madison and Macklin will develop a rare carcinoma before the day is out.) So what if the twins cry about everything until the house and the beach and the block between the two radiate with noise. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. Grace doesn’t have to worry about anyone’s SPF but her own, and has only a brief moment of concern over safety when, from the shade of the canopy, she watches Frankie leap into the ocean with Faith. It’s only natural, Grace thinks, to feel a little fear when people you love willingly throw themselves into the largest, deepest body of water the world has to offer.

That night, when the grandkids are more or less asleep in their beds, the adults drink margaritas on the first floor deck. Robert grills salmon and tempeh, asparagus, peaches dusted with cinnamon and cayenne, keeps everyone’s glasses full, hums until Sol gets up and puts on music. At dinner, Grace notices Frankie concentrating on her lap at the other end of the long outdoor table, a sure sign she’s breaking her own rule about never destroying mealtime centeredness with an electronic device. A moment later, Grace’s phone pings. She pulls it from her jeans pocket, makes sure she’s the only one looking at her screen. _I like your shirt!_ says Frankie’s text.

“What?” Grace mouths, and Frankie shrugs and smiles beatifically. Grace looks down at herself. She wears a pink and white striped button-down over her black bathing suit, which she still has on because she didn’t get it wet and changing for dinner felt like too much work. There are no visible stains, nothing otherwise notable, but it’s an old shirt, almost sloppy. She’s had it at least a decade, and Frankie’s seen it dozens of times. She puts the phone back in her pocket and returns to her meal.

A few hours later, as everyone files off to bed one-by-one or two-by-two, Grace installs herself on a couch in the corner of the profoundly air-conditioned living room with a mug of tea and a thin blue blanket she’s brought from home. She brushes aside Sol’s earnest offer to bring her anything else—Robert must be mad at him—and murmurs _goodnight_ to everyone who passes by. 

There’s stillness all around her, and even amidst the unfamiliar whirr of the house there’s the sense that nothing’s happening in the upstairs rooms she can’t see, that all the lights except for hers are out. Countered only by the lamp glow in which she sits, the darkness feels perfect, and it’s finally quiet enough to read. But she can’t focus, because she’s not reading: she’s waiting, or hopes she’s waiting, realizes now she might have been clearer. 

When a stair step creaks under tentative footsteps, she startles and freezes, though it’s the sound she’s been listening for. A few seconds later, Frankie appears around the corner. She feels her way to the lighted part of the room, sits down next to Grace with a slump. Grace lets her book fall off her lap. She lifts the edge of her blanket and Frankie slides closer, takes Grace in her arms, whispers “Finally.” She kisses the top of Grace’s head, her temple, her jaw, before settling against her lips. She clings as they kiss, and Grace clings back. “This was the longest day of my life,” Frankie says between kisses. “Longer than day three of my Oaxaca trip.” 

Grace knows that day well, if only by story. April 1993: Frankie wandering lost for hours in Lagunas de Chacahua National Park. There were lots of storks. She grins at Frankie. “‘I like your shirt’?”

“Oh, gosh, I don’t even know. It was a miscommunication with myself! I wanted to sext you, but I couldn’t tell if Bud was looking at my phone, and I didn’t want you to feel uncomfortable, because there was absolutely no possible way to get consent from all the way over there, so I panicked and just...sent something nice. It _is_ a great shirt, though. A long-time fave.” She pokes at one of the buttons with her index finger, travels down to the next. Grace shivers. “And now I get to do this.”

“Frankie—” Grace stops Frankie’s hand with hers.

“Just for a minute,” Frankie begs, and Grace relents. Lets go of Frankie’s hand, watches herself get unbuttoned. 

When her shirt is open Frankie seems disappointed to remember the presence of the swimsuit, but she carries on, draws lazy patterns across Grace’s breasts, watches their well-lit reaction with delight. “Hey there,” she says. 

Suddenly the firefly glow of the lamp feels too harsh, like a spotlight, or a burning sun. “It’s the air-conditioning,” Grace says.

“No, you’re swooning.”

“Two things can be true, you goof.” She brushes a finger under Frankie’s chin, tilts her face into the light. The stairs would creak again if there was a problem, and there’s no way Mallory’s waking up after a day chasing two kids and two toddlers on the beach, and they’ve done nothing but whisper. They’re being careful and furtive, just like they agreed. She takes in the sight of Frankie in her pajamas and light summer robe, makeup long gone, hair washed and braided. “I missed you.” Whispered—by necessity—the words come out desperate and low. Pathetic, except she’d like not to think that way. 

“Yeah. Me too.” Frankie bumps Grace’s shoulder with her own. “Can I have some more blanket?” 

They burrow together then, pull the blanket over their bodies almost up to their necks, and Grace finds a way through the layers, feels something on the spectrum of satisfaction when her fingers land against a stretch of bare skin beneath the pajama top. An inevitable force—gravity, maybe, or electromagnetism, or lust—pulls her hand lower, until she’s nudging Frankie’s waistband. 

“Oh,” Frankie says. “That’s dangerous.” 

“Just for a minute,” Grace echoes. They’re quiet then, as if silence can make up for the light still on, for the place they’ve ended up. “Hey,” she says, after she’s flirted a while with the touches she wants to give, felt Frankie shift against her, felt her bite back the sounds she wants to make. “Can we do this without lube? Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” Frankie rests her head on the back of the couch, still leaning against Grace. She adjusts her hips a little more. “Go slow.” 

They go slow, so slow it almost isn’t movement, for several minutes. Grace’s heart pounds with the effort of keeping everything so small. “Is this—is this still okay?” 

“You were right,” Frankie says, turning her head to look at Grace. She’s a little out of breath, and her eyes shine. “We should have told everyone before this trip.”

“Um.” Grace stills the hand between Frankie’s legs. 

“I love you,” Frankie says, almost pouting, and Grace is glad this isn’t the first time she’s heard her say it. “This whole situation sucks, and you were right, and—I’m sorry.” She sighs. “I mean, I can’t sleep away from you for seven nights.”

“We could take this to my room,” Grace says. “Make sure you’re out before anybody’s up.”

“No. Fuck it. I wanna wake up with you. If you’re game, I’m game.”

Grace smiles. She pulls—slowly, slowly—her fingers out of Frankie’s underwear, immediately puts her hand back on the other side of the fabric, holds her firmly but tenderly, and Frankie lets out a shaky, happy breath at the feel of her hand, the sight of her smile. “I’ll come to your room,” Grace says. “You crashing in my room, it’s—it runs the risk of seeming commonplace, like a wacky gal pal thing, and—”

“You’re right,” Frankie says. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the last thing we need right now are wacky gal pal vibes. We need lesbian affair vibes, and with Grace Hanson in my bedroom, that’s what we get.” 

Grace feels herself smile wider. _I love lesbian affair vibes_ , she thinks. But she has to say something. “I love lesbian affair vibes.”

“I know you do, Grace. I know you do.” Frankie frowns. “Will you be okay on the stairs?”

“I’ll be okay. I brought the cane just in case.”

“You’ll be extra okay if I come watch you get ready for bed and then help you up.”

“Creeper,” Grace says, then sobers. “You’re sure about this? A good night’s sleep’ll still seem worth it in the morning?”

Frankie sits up as properly as she can, considering their current position, and looks Grace in the eye. “I’m so stressed out, I’ve already taken three vacation naps,” she says. “This isn’t about sleep.” 

“All right.” Her heart—the opposite, now, of keeping something small.

They stand up and smooth their clothes, get to work folding the blanket. With Grace taking the lead, the end result is nearly respectable. Grace turns off the lamp, and they stand still, waiting for their eyes to adjust. It turns out there was a lot more light the whole time: the half moon, and porch lights left on all night by neighboring houses. A little ambiance, a little light pollution, all making its way past the half-shut Venetian blinds. When they're ready, Grace loops her arm through Frankie’s, and they walk together through the shadowy house.

**Author's Note:**

> First and foremost, thanks so much for reading this. I value and treasure all feedback, including constructive criticism, so if you care to let me know what you thought I'd be delighted to hear it. 
> 
> Second, if you'd like to read the full text of the May Sarton poem and also experience me having a lot of feelings, you can do so [here](http://chainofclovers.tumblr.com/post/168930259538/inside-weather).


End file.
